InsideSales.com Raises $100 Million

SILICONSLOPES, Utah, April 28, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — InsideSales.com, the leading cloud-based sales acceleration technology company, announced today it has closed and committed $100 million in Series C financing to boost revenue growth, expand its portfolio of cutting-edge technology solutions for salespeople, and enter new geographic markets.

Polaris Partners led the round and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) was the other major investor. Acadia Woods, EPIC Ventures, salesforce.com and Zetta Venture Partners also participated, while previous investors Hummer Winblad and U.S. Venture Partners signaled their continued support by joining the round. The round also included individual investors, including Fraser Bullock, managing director at Sorenson Capital.

InsideSales.com has achieved 107 percent year-over-year sales growth with corresponding growth in employee count. The company currently provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to more than 1,000 customers, including large enterprise organizations like Fidelity, Microsoft, Groupon, McGraw-Hill and Marketo.

“Once in a while, a company has an opportunity to truly transform an entire industry,” said Dave Barrett, managing partner at Polaris Partners. “InsideSales.com is that kind of company. The reinvention of the sales industry is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. The company’s patented technologies and runaway revenue growth, fueled by new customer acquisition as well as strong expansion of existing accounts, make it an incredibly attractive platform for the next generation of organizations who want and need to accelerate sales.”

This funding round validates the groundbreaking 2014 Sales Acceleration Technology Market Size Study, which indicates that North American companies already spend $12.8 billion annually on sales acceleration technology — with a heavy emphasis on sales communications and intelligence. And the market is growing. The study estimates that North American businesses could spend in excess of $30 billion on sales acceleration technology by 2017.

“Inside sales teams have transformed the way companies sell their products to enterprises. It is the new enterprise sales model,” said KPCB General Partner Matt Murphy. “Yet the function has emerged without a purpose-built solution to optimize productivity and accelerate the time to close deals. The InsideSales.com platform not only manages this process, but its learning engine and algorithmic approaches bring intelligence that dramatically increases the ability to close customers.”

InsideSales.com offers the sales industry’s first comprehensive sales acceleration platform, including innovations in sales communications, gamification, predictive analytics and data visualization. Its flagship product, PowerDialer™ for Salesforce, has been among the top-rated applications on the Salesforce AppExchange for the past five years. InsideSales.com also offers mCall™, a mobile app for field salespeople, which is available on Salesforce1.

“Customers, partners and investors frequently ask us what our secret sauce is,” InsideSales.com CEO and founder Dave Elkington said. "Our secret sauce is our scientific approach to sales. We use data as a strategic weapon to systematically improve sales performance and drive sales growth for our own company and for customers who want to maximize revenue growth.

“InsideSales.com is analyzing millions of anonymized sales transactions and leveraging this data in ways no other company has ever imagined,” Elkington continued. “This additional $100 million in financing, which brings our total funding to $140 million, will enable InsideSales.com to continue improving and expanding its patented sales acceleration technology to better serve its valued customers and partners.”

Additional quotes from investors

“InsideSales.com’s thought leadership in the fast growing yet little-understood high-velocity sales market is transforming the industry. The company’s sales acceleration platform provides visibility, automation and intelligence to the inside sales process for which time and productivity are of the essence. Since we first partnered with InsideSales.com 15 months ago, we have seen companies ranging from large enterprises to venture-backed start-ups achieve unprecedented sales growth using the InsideSales.com platform.”
- Dafina Toncheva, partner at U.S. Venture Partners
“The inside sales model is disrupting the traditional sales model everywhere in the market. Sales teams around the world are being asked to close more business in less time, with greater predictability. The sales acceleration platform developed byInsideSales.com helps companies across a variety of industries do just that by embodying the best practices for these high-velocity organizations. Our continuing partnership is based on the company having some of the best SaaS metrics we have ever seen.”
- Lars Leckie, managing director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
“The science of predictive analytics stands to be one of the most impactful technology markets over the next decade. InsideSales.com differentiates itself from other sales technologies through not only industry-leading predictive analytics, but advanced and patented approaches to machine learning and cognition. The result is a platform that helps sales teams maximize their performance.”
- Mark Gorenberg, founding managing member at Zetta Venture Partners

About InsideSales.com

InsideSales.com offers cloud-based sales acceleration technology. The company provides the sales industry’s first comprehensive sales acceleration platform that creates high-performance sales teams with breakthrough technology including communications for immediate response, gamification for sales motivation, predictive analytics for lead prioritization, and data visualization for an immersive experience with sales data. The American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP) has recognized InsideSales.com as the SaaS provider of the year for four consecutive years. The company has been listed among the fastest growing companies by Inc. and Deloitte and as one of the top 100 private companies by AlwaysOn. InsideSales.com ranks No. 5 in the nation for jobs created in the software industry and No. 72 in the nation for jobs created in all industries by Inc. InsideSales.com has published leading research in the Harvard Business Review and Forbes. The company has been issued or allowed 8 U.S. patents and has 11 patents pending, with several focused on the areas of predictive analytics and machine learning. InsideSales.com enterprise customers include Fidelity, Microsoft, Groupon, McGraw-Hill, Marketo and more. To try the technology, visit InsideSales.com.